Issue 18

Rachel Walker realizes she has it better than most college students whose 2019-2020 academic year was disrupted by COVID-19. As much as she likes Florida A&M University, she often felt a bit homesick for Atlanta. She has a close relationship with her family, so when COVID sent students packing mid-March,…

Coronavirus and Mental Health In April, Active Minds, the nation’s premier nonprofit organization supporting mental health awareness and education for students, surveyed 2,086 college students about the impact of COVID-19 on their mental health. In the survey,  80% reported that COVID-19 had negatively impacted their mental health, and 1 in…

The students on the Zoom platform take a deep breath in and then exhale with ear-piercing screams. They are doing the “WE Breath,” a unique way to let go of stress and anxiety practiced at the Wellness Environment from which they are graduating – remotely.  They are the fifth first…

Much of the conversation around reopening colleges in the fall has focused on mitigating the risk of outbreaks and creating policies to keep the campus community safe as a whole. While these conversations are necessary and constructive, it is critical that colleges and universities put a particular focus on students…

Vaping, the use of electronic cigarettes to vaporize nicotine-laden liquid, has become widespread within American high schools, colleges, and universities. These institutions are faced with the challenge of deciding whether they should adopt vaping-friendly policies, as a means of encouraging smoking cessation and harm reduction, or if they should ban…

Nearly every day for the last four months, Dr. Rachel Levine has stood six feet away from Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf.  As Secretary of Health, she appears with him at daily news briefings, providing the data and the detail behind the state’s policies regarding COVID-19. Levine’s turn in the public…

College and religion don’t always go together.  Young people questioning their traditions and searching for their identities are less likely to fall in line among the faithful. But at a time when students are reporting mental illness and emotional distress as never before, three campus ministry leaders explain how the…

The Children’s Grove: Where Kindness and Mental Health Meet The Children’s Grove in Columbia, Missouri, started out as a memorial to victims of violence, but over the years it has transformed into a kindness incubator contributing to the emotional and mental wellbeing of children and young adults, from pre-school to…